As Above, So Below Read online

  “Peter!”

  She ran towards him with her arms stretched out. Bruegel embraced her, marking her garments with his blood-wet trousers.

  “We heard the screams,” said Mayken. “The page said you were bloody on the floor. Oh, Peter, I thought you were dead.”

  “I did it to make Williblad leave you alone,” said Bruegel.

  “There was no need, Peter! Yesterday—after I saw you in the street—I grasped my folly. I broke off with Williblad. Oh, Peter. Forgive me.”

  Bruegel’s eyes fell on the left wing of Bosch’s masterpiece. Jesus stood between Adam and Eve, marrying them. In the central panel the nude figures writhed in lust, and in the right wing they suffered the torments of the damned. Better by far to live in Eden. Any lingering anger he’d held towards Mayken melted away.

  “I forgive you, Mayken. Everyone has a past. I—” He wanted to confess something to her, but he couldn’t say it.

  Mayken took a step back, looked him in the eyes, and plucked the thought out. “You were my mother’s lover, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Bruegel, his face flushing red. “Years ago. I was a boy and she was lonely. Your father was off fighting the Turks.”

  Mayken gave a little nod, took a breath, and pressed on. “The thing is, I’ve been worried that—you’re not my real father are you?”

  “Oh God, no, Mayken. That would be monstrous. Your mother was already quickened when—when we had our affair. It ended before you were born. It was folly.” Bruegel laughed giddily. Losing his secret was like shrugging off a stone.

  “Folly like me and Williblad,” said Mayken with a tremulous smile. “You’ll still have me?”

  “I love you, Mayken,” said Bruegel. “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes,” said Mayken. “Yes. I always thought I would.”

  Eleven

  The Adoration of the Kings

  Brussels, May 1563–December 1564

  It was late of a balmy May evening. Mayken and Peter were in the little garden behind the Coecke house, standing beneath a flowering plum tree. Tomorrow they would be wed. The house was full of voices and candlelight; Mayken’s mother had put on a preparatory dinner and some of the guests were still here.

  “Look,” said Mayken, taking hold of the plum tree and shaking it. She’d shaken this tree every spring for as long as she could remember. “It’s snowing.” The sweet-smelling white petals drifted down onto her upturned face and Peter kissed her. He was very affectionate tonight, every bit as excited as she.

  “I love having them fall on me,” said Mayken after the kiss. More than snow, the petals had always made her think of weddings. It was hard to believe her time was almost here. She and Peter shook the trunk some more; there seemed to be no end of blossoms upon the thickly branched little tree. Mayken felt open and happy, she felt as if the petals were falling right through her heart. Peter hugged her, his arms strong around her, his lips smooth and warm in the midst of his beard.

  “Come on, then, Peter,” came a voice from the kitchen door. “It’s almost midnight. Let’s go back down the street to your studio.” It was Peter’s fussy old friend Abraham Ortelius from Antwerp.

  Ortelius had brought them a new wall map as a wedding gift when he came down yesterday, and had insisted on spending half of today getting it properly glued onto a wall, not that it had been easy to find the wall space in the stuffed old Coecke house. In the end they’d put the map in the kitchen. “It’ll be good for Mienemeuie to see it,” Mayken’s mother had said with a laugh. “She still thinks the ocean boils below the equator.” To which their cook Mienemeuie had responded, “And how do you know it doesn’t, Mevrouw? You’ve never been there.” Cocking her hands on her hips, the wiry old Mienemeuie had squinted at the big new map. “Doesn’t mean a damned thing to me! What’s supposed to be where? The only part that makes sense are the little pictures of ships and sea monsters.”

  “Peter?” repeated Ortelius.

  “Wedding blossoms!” sang Peter. “Look.” He gave the tree such a shake that the cloud of petals drifted as far as the kitchen door. Waf, who was out in the yard with them, raised his nose to sniff at the falling flowers.

  “Lovely,” said Ortelius. “My new house has trees like this, but they’re not in bloom yet. I’ll have to shake some petals for Williblad.” Mayken and Peter groaned in unison, then burst out laughing. Nothing could dampen their gaiety tonight.

  After the failed assassination attempt, Williblad had been driven out of Brussels by William the Sly’s bodyguards. He’d ended up moving in with Ortelius back in Antwerp, where Ortelius had recently moved into a larger house. Ortelius gave him free room and board; in return Williblad helped a bit with Ortelius’s antiquities business. With Ortelius’s mother recently dead and his sister relocated to London, Ortelius welcomed the company.

  Upon his arrival yesterday, Ortelius had been worried Peter might be angry with him for sheltering Williblad, but Peter seemed not to care—so long as Williblad remained in Antwerp. Mayken had trouble visualizing what Ortelius and Williblad did together. Did Williblad sexually penetrate the man-loving bachelor? An incongruous thought.

  In any case, the love-smitten Ortelius seemed unable to stop talking about Williblad; they’d heard about nothing else from him for the last two days. It had made Mayken and Peter uncomfortable at first, but Ortelius’s constant repetition of Williblad’s name had begun to have the effect of partly healing over the embarrassment. At least he hadn’t brought Williblad here.

  Mayken sometimes wondered what she’d seen in Williblad. Handsome, yes, but unhappy and empty-headed. Peter had more talent in his little finger than Williblad had in all of his beautiful body. And if Peter was a bit old—why, Williblad was a decade older. On the other hand, Williblad had been all hers. Mayken was still upset about Peter and her mother. Couldn’t mother have had the decency to leave Peter alone for her daughter? And, aged or not, Williblad’s face and body were lovely. It still made Mayken flush to think about their hours in Granvelle’s library together. She kissed Peter again, pushing these thoughts away.

  Another figure appeared at the kitchen door: Marcus Noot, a well-off widower who’d risen to the high political post of City Father. He was Mayken’s mother’s gentleman friend.

  “The deflowering’s in progress!” cried Noot, seeing the drifting petals and the embracing couple. He’d had more than his share of wine tonight.

  “All you men get out of here,” called Mayken’s mother from the kitchen. “It’s time for me to have a talk with my daughter.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Noot. “Tell the girl about men.”

  Peter gave Mayken a last kiss good night, and then he, Ortelius, Waf, and Noot were on their way. Mayken and her mother sat in the candlelit kitchen sharing a piece of cake.

  “I’m so happy for you, Mayken,” said Mayken’s mother. “Peter’s a wonderful man.” She had a glass of wine in front of her, and her smile was a little crooked. Once again Mayken felt a stab of anger about Peter and her mother. She felt a sudden need to lash out.

  “I know about you and Peter,” said Mayken.

  “What do you mean?” said her mother, her face cautious.

  “I know that you lay with him when you were pregnant with me.” Saying it out loud forced Mayken to imagine it. It seemed she was always thinking about sex these days. She gazed at her mother’s mouth, picturing Peter licking it.

  “Who told you that?” said the mouth.

  “I guessed. And I asked Peter just to be sure. I’d been worried he might be my real father.” Mayken still had a lingering fear of this hideous prospect. “He’s not, is he?”

  “Of course not,” cried Mayken’s mother. “You’re Master Coecke’s daughter through and through. You’ve got his orderliness and his head for business. Not to mention his small nose.”

  “But it’s true about you and Peter. Don’t change the subject. How could you do this to me?”

  “Cold old ashes,” sighed Mayken’s
mother. “He was a boy. I was lonely and pregnant. You weren’t even born! We were different people then. When your father found out, he nearly slit Peter’s throat with a scimitar. The one that hangs on the wall in his old studio.” She laughed ruefully. “Imagine this coming back again to haunt me! Sometimes I think life is too long. Don’t even think about this ancient nonsense. I never do, and I’m sure Peter doesn’t either.”

  “You’re—you’re not after Peter anymore, are you?” This was Mayken’s biggest fear. To be overshadowed forever by her mother. She wanted a husband who was all her own. Not for the first time, she wished she’d been allowed to pick out a boy of her own age. It was tiresome to always be thinking about the future of the family studios. And if her mother was going to go around mooning after Peter it would be impossible.

  “Perish the thought. Your happiness is so much more important to me than anything else, Mayken. And the grandchildren! Why would an old crone like me meddle in that?” In the candlelight, Mayken’s mother looked both wise and sly.

  “You’re not quite a crone, mother. You have men visiting you all the time.”

  “Marcus is a bit of a fool, isn’t he?” said her mother with a smile. “If the truth be told, I’d never link up with another man. I value my freedom too highly. That’s the reward for marrying an older man, you know. By the time you’re middle-aged you’re on your own. Nobody to answer to, and you can amuse yourself by playing a few suitors.”

  “Marcus was drunk tonight,” said Mayken. She herself had no head for wine. “Did you hear what he said about deflowering?” Mayken giggled. She was secretly glad she had her experience with Williblad to set off against Peter’s affairs with mother and with that goose-faced peasant Anja. She couldn’t tell if her mother knew about Williblad or not. But it was just as well to stop talking about the great issues. It was comfortable to gossip about the smaller things with mother.

  “No matter about Marcus,” said old Mayken amiably. “I’m glad I had some wine in me for this conversation. Peter is yours, and yours alone.”

  The service was at a neighborhood church called Our Lady of the Chapel, just a few blocks down the Hoogstraat from the Coecke house. The priest was Father Ghislain, a good old man, dear and familiar to the Coecke family.

  The guests were wonderfully turned out. The men wore dark tights and jackets, with slits in the leg-of-mutton sleeves revealing yellow and red silk linings. Each of the men had a formal Low Lands ruff collar made of yards of starchy lace folded over and over in figure-eight loops. Peter’s head upon his collar made Mayken think of an egg in a china eggcup—an eager, excited egg.

  The women wore long-sleeved cottes with fine tunics. Mayken’s tunic was of pale blue, and atop that she wore a sleeveless surcoat of yellow silk embroidered with gold brocade outlines of leaves and flowers. She too had a lace ruff collar; hers was open in front and rose up behind her head like a low halo. As was the custom for a bride, her hair hung free, quite golden in the sunlight.

  After the wedding, their party walked down Hoogstraat in their finery, with all the neighbors and shopkeepers smiling and cheering. Waf had escaped from where they’d penned him in the Coecke house garden, and led the way down the street, tail held high. Back at the Coecke house, Mienemeuie served a meal of oysters, wood snipe, and leeks, hares with a brown caper sauce, mountains of potatoes and onions, and cinnamon pancakes. Among the guests were Ortelius, Hans Franckert and his wife, Hennie van Mander, Marcus Noot, and some of Mayken’s young friends, all very gay and cheerful. Rather than a rowdy peasantlike affair with bagpipes, they had civilized conversation and, after the meal, some harpsichord music, played by Mayken’s friend Suzanna Smijters. Peter and Mayken danced together, Peter very handsome in his lace collar, though by now the folds were crumpled like the coastline on a map. Mayken wished she felt more swept away with love.

  In the days before the wedding, Mayken’s mother had moved down into a little room beside her studio on the second floor so that Peter and Mayken could settle into the great third-floor bedroom that Mayken’s parents had once shared. In the mornings Mayken would wake up with Peter next to her in bed; sometimes he’d be asleep, but if he were awake he’d be on one elbow looking out the window down into the street. They’d kiss and talk and have bread and chocolate in their room.

  The closer Mayken got to Peter, the more she liked him. Though he had the kindness and wisdom of maturity, he retained the fire and the playfulness of a schoolboy. Mayken’s love for him began steadily to grow. She felt it to be like a fat winter turnip rather than like a spring flower that suddenly bursts into bloom. She tried once to explain her sense of this to Peter.

  “Oh, not a muddy turnip,” he protested. “Let’s say your love is a fine orange pumpkin. I’ll water you and polish you and see how big you grow.”

  Peter moved his studio into the Coecke house, setting up shop in Master Coecke’s old workspace, the huge, open attic on the fourth floor, a lovely space with a smooth wooden floor, gable windows, a fireplace, and a great peaked ceiling that rose from eight feet near the walls to twenty feet at the ridge of the roof. His joy at occupying the studio was so great that Mayken had to wonder if her house were not, in the end, the real reason he’d married her.

  She went ahead and asked him this. Peter insisted that, although he rejoiced in the studio, he’d live anywhere, so long as it was with her. In any case the studio was, he insisted, more hers than his. He suggested they enjoy it together, and that he teach her all about painting. Whether Mayken herself became a painter or not, if she was to be the lady of the house in a dynasty of artists, she would do well to know the secrets of the trade.

  Peter hung his beloved convex mirror above the mantelpiece. And Peter’s pale blond new apprentice Bengt Bots arrived along with the brushes and oils and paints. Bengt’s father had been so angry with him for abandoning falconry that he wouldn’t let him remain in Prince William’s palace, so Bengt was to sleep on a cot in the studio.

  And thus the new workshop got under way. Peter had finished up his two Tower of Babel paintings in his Hoogstraat studio, delivering the large one to Nicolas Jonghelinck, and making Mayken a gift of the small one. She liked it quite a bit, especially when Peter pointed out his joke that the outsides and the insides of the towers didn’t match.

  “Like the Church these days,” he said, though he rarely spoke of religion. “Or like a person at disharmony with themselves. Life runs well only when what’s above matches what’s below.” And he punctuated this by kissing Mayken and intimately pressing her belly against his. So far the new studio was seeming like fun.

  Peter’s first task in the Coecke studio was to make good on his commission to paint a Flight into Egypt for Cardinal Granvelle. Blandly pretending his ignorance of Lazare’s plan to assassinate Prince William, the Cardinal had sent around a messenger to ask when Bruegel would deliver the finished work. As a second payment would be then due, it seemed as well to finish the picture. Peter had already started it in Hoogstraat, and he’d brought with him the pots of paint he’d made up for it.

  In the mornings, after breakfast and some comfortable time in bed, Peter would head upstairs and rouse Bengt, who tended to sleep late. At first, Mayken felt like she still had to go downstairs to help in her mother’s studio, running out to get paints for her miniatures or laying out threads for her tapestries. But being so dutiful made her weary, and then resentful. Was she to be her mother’s girl forever? After a week of this, she snapped something angry at old Mayken, and her mother quickly relieved her of her old obligations.

  “Don’t worry about me, Mayken,” said her mother, holding a tiny brush with a dab of red paint. She was working on a miniature portrait of William of Orange’s wife. Somehow she’d gotten a bit of the paint on the tip of her big nose. “I can take care of things in my studio, really I can. Have fun getting to know your husband. That’s more important. And how about this for a new job? Why don’t you start running all our business affairs? I’d rather have you
as a manager than an assistant. And then I can be the one to sigh and roll her eyes.” She laughed easily, and Mayken’s spirits surged sky-high.

  So Mayken began starting the days by going up to Peter’s studio with him. Peter decided to use Mayken as a model for the Mary in his Flight into Egypt. It was pleasant to pose, to sit and to be looked at by her lively new husband. It was remarkable to see how he could transform her into colors and curves. Just to train Bengt’s hand, Peter set him to work trying to make a watercolor copy of Peter’s picture while he worked. As Peter painted, he talked to Mayken and Bengt, telling them the tricks and recipes of the painter’s craft.

  A few of Peter’s phrases were familiar—though Mayken’s father had died when she was only six, she still had some memories of hearing him teaching Peter. One of the familiar sayings was, “An egg is mostly water,” to explain how egg-mixed paint could dry so fast. “Mix three shades of three shades,” was her father’s injunction for getting smooth colorings, and “Look through your painting like a window,” was his old rubric for laying out a scene in perspective. Mayken had always wondered about that last one; as a child she’d practiced looking through all kinds of things as if they were windows, including the faces of her friends.

  Peter had many other sayings new to Mayken, many of them relating to his uncanny ability to paint his lively little women and men. He sometimes called them his pachters—the Flemish word for “tenant farmers.” If Peter’s canvases were his estates, the pictures’ painted inhabitants were his tenants. Among his teachings were these:

  “A runner flies; a walker glides.”

  “Better too fat than too thin.”

  “A hat makes a head.”